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I am collecting information for a core column entitled Osensei: It Had to Be Felt. One part of this is as follows: There are still a few individuals alive who took ukemi from Ueshiba Morihei. I can think of the following individuals: Tada, Suganuma, Kobayashi, Chiba, Yamada, Saotome, Anno, Isoyama, Inagaki, Shimizu, Watanabe, Masuda, Henry Kono, Bob Nadeau, Inoue (formerly of Yoshinkan), some of the old shihan of Hawaii. There are surely others.

What I am requesting is that people interview these people, with a specific goal in mind (Tada sensei has been so interviewed, and Isoyama sensei is, I believe, pending). To get a fine-grained description of the actual experience. After you've gotten this description, go deeper. What happened within your body? What do you think/believe he was doing.

I believe it would be ideal if the interviewer had some experience of the work of someone like Akuzawa Minoru, Mike Sigman, Dan Harden, Toby Threadgill, or a high level Chinese martial arts instructor. I'm not saying that the people on this list have the same training regimen, the same ideas, etc. (That's a discussion I truly don't want to revisit). Rather, your experience of one type of internal training/aiki can serve as a benchmark so that YOUR questions are not vague and impressionistic. I am asking for an engineer's approach rather than a romanticist.

Please send the result of such interviews to me, either through the message function here or directly through email.

I hope to thereby establish a data base of experience, before these people are gone and all we have left is fantasy and assumptions.

JIm - Thank you. One thing. I"m not going to try anyone. I"m not students of any of these individuals. I'm urging YOU (not you personally) to do so. Send me the interview accounts. I will stitch them together into a column/archive.
Best
Ellis Amdur

Try Koretoshi Maruyama of Aikido Yuishinkai. He often talks about what it was like to receive for Osensei, but not with the detail you would need. If someone is in a position to talk to him, that might work. I will certainly ask him a few questions next time I see him, but I don't know when that will be.